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Batman Incorporated time! Former Bleeding Cool reporter Chris Arrant, better known for his long run as Senior Editor at Newsarama/GamesRadar, recently left to help ReedPOP’s new geek entertainment newsite Popverse, as Editor-In-Chief. And he picked former THR reporter Graeme McMillan to write for them – smart move. DC Comics gets to add another media partner to their list, and ReedPOP find a new outlet to promote their comic book conventions including NYCC, ECCC, C2E2 and this weekend’s MCM London. And they launched with a handy DC Comics official PR-delivered scoop for a new Batman Vs. Robin oversized, five-issue series by Mark Waid and Mahmud Asrar that ties into the current World’s Finest series by Waid and Dan Mora and that is beginning in September.
Damian and his father have to come to terms with something outside their regular day-to-day crimefighting. “What I can say is that the first arc of World’s Finest is, was, and always has been, designed deliberately to lead into what is going to be Batman vs. Robin,” the writer teases. “What I was trying to do with Batman versus Robin was try to take them into a realm that I’m not used to seeing them in, which is dark magic sorcery, rather than science, rather than logic and detective stuff. We’ve seen Batman and sort of peripheral magic, but I want to get into the down and dirty of it.”
And that this is part of a longer interview with Waid to be published by Popverse at a later date. Well, obviously, I am not just going to rerun someone else’s story without adding something new. Of course, Bleeding Cool doesn;t have the kind of relationship with DC Comics that Arrant and McMillan – and for that matter, ReedPOP have. So I will just have to grab one from the ether as usual – or maybe it could have been last weekend’s Lake Comic Comic Art Festival? It’s where we broke the news about Marvel and Conan, after all. So, yes, accompanying the release of a Batman Vs Robin mini-series, in September or October, DC Comics will be publishing a new Batman Incorporated series in either October or November 2022.
Batman Incorporated was created by Grant Morrison, Cameron Stewart and Frazer Irving for Batman and Robin #16 in 2010, but soon span off into its own series, by Morrison and Yanick Paquette, that saw the concept of Batman around the world franchised to lots of cities that needed it, each getting their own local Batman, with a support network from Wayne Enterprises. It created a number of new characters for membership as well as using some international characters from throughout Batman’s historical past, whether part of current DC canon or not. Caught between the DC Universe rebooting with the New 52, certain characters had to be removed from the series, and was relaunched in 2012 with a new #1 by Morrison and Chris Burnham.
Recently, the concept returned in the Batman ongoing comic book, with Lex Luthor having taken over the operation. Seizing it back, Batman has now put the abrasive-but-rich Ghost-Maker in charge of the operation, with Clown Hunter at his side, and this is the series that will be published, including a new character to debut in the upcoming Batman Annual.